Lover Come Back
by Masquerading as Quality
Summary: "Time passes, the world changes," said Maleficent. "It's the same for me as it is for you." But Aurora knew she was wrong. It wasn't the same. It couldn't be. [AU, kind of Early-to-Bed-verse, one-shot.]


**A/N:** I apologize in advance—this is sad and twisted. I blame the new episode of OUAT—it really messed me up. Anyway, I promise the next chapter of Prisoner is much happier. This is kind of ETB-verse, but meant as a stand-alone piece. At the very least, it presupposes a relationship between Maleficent and Aurora. Songs are "Lover, Come Back to Me" from The New Moon by Sigmund Romberg and "My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose," which is a folk song. Feedback would be much appreciated!

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_Every road I walk along, I've walked along with you._  
_No wonder I am lonely._  
_The sky is blue, the night is cold,_  
_The moon is new, but love is old._  
_And while I'm waiting here, this heart of mine is singing,_  
_"Lover, come back to me!"_

Maleficent was angry with her.

There was a time not so long ago when Aurora would have feared such knowledge. She feared that if Maleficent ever became angry with her, she would revert to the cold and ruthless person she was to her enemies.

But of course it wasn't like that at all. Whenever Maleficent was angry with Aurora, she was at least twice as angry with herself for being angry. The result was that she was simply miserable, and more often than not, if Aurora did not stop her, she ended up apologizing for something which was Aurora's fault.

This time, however, it was Aurora's turn to be miserable. The decision hadn't been an easy one to make, and she desperately needed Maleficent to try to understand. She needed to speak with her, to share all of her thoughts and bounce all of her most outlandish ideas off of her as she always had. But Maleficent would not speak with her, and whenever she caught sight of Aurora, she glowered darkly at her, only to turn away with a slight hunch in her shoulders and quickly exit the room.

This had been going on for nearly a week, and Aurora was beginning to feel quite desperate.

"Maleficent?" she said to the shadowy figure who sat before a roaring fire, eyes steadfastly trained on the pages of a book.

"Are you so angry with me that you won't even listen to me?" she asked, equal parts frustrated and hurt.

This caught Maleficent's attention, however. She did not look up, but she responded, her voice quiet and slightly raspy. "I'm not angry with you, Aurora."

Encouraged by this sudden and drastic leap in her circumstances, Aurora approached her. "Then why have you been acting this way?"

Maleficent stood suddenly, and Aurora started as she always did. For someone so tall and lanky, Maleficent moved with agility that was almost frightening. Before Aurora had even finished blinking, she had gone from hunched over in her chair to looming over Aurora, eyes burning with volumes more than she would ever speak aloud.

"Is the idea so unfathomable?" she asked, her words clipped, her expression blank but for the burning in her black eyes.

"You see?" Aurora said sadly. "You are upset."

Maleficent withdrew from Aurora and straightened her posture so that the height difference between them was even more pronounced. "I said I wasn't angry. I didn't say I wasn't upset."

"May I ask you something?" Aurora reached out for Maleficent's hands.

"Of course," Maleficent replied.

"How long are you going to live?"

Maleficent shrugged, a most uncharacteristic motion on her part. She did not take Aurora's hands. "A thousand years or more. It's possible I could live forever if I stayed out of trouble. Why?"

"What do you think you'll be doing a hundred years from now?"

Maleficent met her gaze only to pointedly raise one eyebrow. She did not understand where Aurora was going, and she did not like it. "I hadn't really thought about it. I reiterate: why?"

"Doesn't all that time scare you? Doesn't it terrify you, how different the world could be and you'd still be much the same?"

"Of course not. Time passes, the world changes. It's the same for me as it is for you."

This was where Aurora knew she was wrong. It wasn't the same. It couldn't be.

Aurora had been with Maleficent for twenty-five years. To Maleficent, twenty-five years was as nothing. She'd lived over a century before Aurora came into existence, and as she'd just confirmed, she would continue to live at least a millennium more.

To Aurora, twenty-five years was the vast majority of her lifetime. What was more, it _felt_ like a long time. During that time, Aurora had learned a lot of things about Maleficent. She'd learned that Maleficent almost never slept more than a few hours a night. She'd learned that Maleficent could read several languages and play several musical instruments with astonishing skill. She'd learned that, though Maleficent was a deadly threat to her enemies, she would sooner die than allow any further harm to come to Aurora. Aurora had witnessed her flying across the entirety of the sprawling ballroom just to catch Aurora when she tripped on the stairs. She'd witnessed her go half-mad with worry when Aurora had scraped her knee while walking alone.

She'd learned that Maleficent was very rarely at peace. To witness her in a moment of contented stillness was an untold treasure. Aurora hadn't even realized what it would look like, Maleficent truly at peace, until she had seen it. Nearly three years after the infamous battle which had nearly cost them their lives, Aurora had finally recovered as much as she ever would, and she had believed that she had adjusted to the enigma that was Maleficent. She'd believed she was ready to venture further into the countless unknowns that surrounded her beloved savior, and so one night, when they lay together in the darkness, Aurora had dared to ask Maleficent if they might try something a bit more intimate than the cautious kisses which were always initiated by her and never refused nor deepened by Maleficent.

Aurora woke when the sun rose to find Maleficent, who would normally have been up for hours by dawn, sleeping peacefully. She lay on her back, one arm draped over her stomach and the other near her head. Her blanket had either slipped off of her or been pulled by Aurora, and it only covered her past the prominent bones of her slender hips. Aurora propped herself up on her elbow and took a moment to admire Maleficent without worrying that at any second, Maleficent might turn those questioning eyes upon her and demand an explanation, when the only explanation was that Aurora found her impossibly beautiful and wanted to look at her as often as possible.

After a few moments of unabashed admiration, Aurora began to feel a bit embarrassed by her behaviour. She pulled the blankets up around her own shoulders, for it was rather cold, and nestled herself against Maleficent's side, wrapping one arm around her waist and delighting in the sensation of the bare skin of Maleficent's shoulder against her cheek.

Maleficent stirred, but she did not jump to attention as she usually did when Aurora caught her by surprise. She made a low, quiet humming sound, shifted slightly, and ran her hand through Aurora's hair a few times before cradling her head and leaning down to plant a gentle kiss upon her forehead.

At times like this, when Maleficent's expression was neutral, but her eyes were fraught with worry and pain Aurora was not certain she would ever fully understand, Aurora tried to remember her the way she had been in that moment, and a handful of moments since: peaceful, contented, and happy.

"It is unfathomable, Maleficent," she said, and then promptly wished she hadn't. The momentary flicker of pain that crossed Maleficent's face and deadened her eyes caused her heart to wrench painfully in her chest. "I'm sorry. You know that isn't what I meant."

When Aurora had first read the book that made her decision for her, she'd felt constantly nauseated for at least a month. There weren't very many stories about fairies who fell in love with humans, and all of the others Aurora had read had ended tragically. In this one, though, the fairy and the human had overcome their tribulations and their many, many differing opinions, and they had managed, like Maleficent and Aurora, to carve out a small corner of the world for themselves where they could be happy and together and in love. They were even married and they raised two children together.

After many, many years, the human died, and the fairy was left heartbroken. For more than a decade, she mourned her husband. She wore only black, saw no one but her children—who were closer to mortals than to fairies and who had children of their own by that time—and she vowed that she would mourn her beloved the rest of her life, be it another decade, another hundred years, or another thousand or more.

Then, in the eleventh year of her mourning, a band of male fairies passed through her land. She passed them on her way to visit her grandson and she never made it there, for one of the male fairies was so handsome and so charming that she was overcome with lust and took him back to her bed immediately.

The message of the story was clear. Fairies and humans could love one another, certainly. But the human would invariably die long before the fairy even began to feel old. And no matter how deep the fairy believed her love to be, she would find that the few years she spent mourning were not too troublesome in the grand scheme of her life. She would move on, and at the end of her life, she would think fondly on the human with whom she whiled away a few hours. It would never occur to her that those few hours of her life had been the entirety of the human's life. It would never occur to her that what had been a very lovely little something to her had been absolutely everything to her mortal lover.

The idea of Maleficent with some nameless, faceless other person had made her physically ill, and she had derived a small, twisted kind of pleasure from how worried it made Maleficent. _Serves you right_, she'd thought, _stealing my life away from me_.

This was of course a completely inaccurate summation of their relationship, for if not for Maleficent's interference, Aurora would have had very little life at all. Once she was done being unnecessarily angry, she became aggressively defensive of Maleficent in her mind. Maleficent was different, she maintained. They were different.

After a few years of feeling this way, though, and as the story still haunted her every thought, Aurora realized that this was a rather childish sentiment. It was inevitable that she would die long before Maleficent did. It would have been even if Maleficent were human, for Aurora was not a particularly healthy person. For the first two years of their relationship, they had lived in constant fear that each day would be Aurora's last, and Aurora knew it was nothing other than the sheer strength of Maleficent's will and love for her that was the cause of her miraculous recovery.

But Maleficent was young. This was not difficult to grasp in practice—there wasn't a single wrinkle on her face and she was extremely strong and agile for someone of her build. In theory, though, Aurora had to take a moment every time she thought of Maleficent's actual age to remind herself that this was _young_.

The point was that Maleficent was young for a fairy, and Aurora did not truly want Maleficent to mourn her for a thousand years or more. Maleficent had not had a particularly happy life, and Aurora did not want to be the only brief hour of happiness she ever experienced. She wanted Maleficent to love again, perhaps a thousand times over, before she died, for that was the amount of love Maleficent deserved.

It was far more than Aurora could give her.

"What I mean," she tried to explain, "is that you deserve so much more than I can ever hope to give you."

"Don't say that," Maleficent snapped. "You know it's nonsense."

"But it isn't!" Aurora insisted. She reached out, but Maleficent flinched away. "You are young! You think of a thousand years and you see only possibility! I…Maleficent, I feel so old!"

She knew she wasn't, not really. Forty-four for anyone else wasn't exactly young, but it didn't spell death the way it did in Aurora's mind. She supposed it had something to do with her injuries from the battle all those years ago, the pain that always nagged at her and sometimes overpowered her, to the point that she couldn't make it out of bed all day.

She did not for one second regret what she had done. In fact, it only reinforced her decision. She would have died first anyway. Maleficent had a whole, long life ahead of her, unfettered by pain and illness. And once Aurora realized this, she didn't feel so bad for tying Maleficent down for a few years. Once she was gone, Maleficent would be free to do as she pleased, and Aurora would be happy to have known such devotion all of her days.

"Aurora, you're not even half a century old. If you were a fairy, you'd scarcely be considered an adult."

Aurora shook her head firmly, but her sadness was beginning to overwhelm her. "If I were a fairy, I would be nearly five hundred."

"Very well, if that's the way you want to play it, you wouldn't even be as old as Mistress Merryweather." Maleficent lifted her chin ever so slightly, a show of defiance, as if to say _I dare you to try and outwit me_. There was a time when Aurora had found it intimidating, and a time that followed when she had found it incredibly endearing. What remained of that emotion caused Aurora to smile. She hated what she knew she must say to win the argument, and yet she knew there would be no other way to make Maleficent understand.

"No, but I daresay Merryweather has never even come down with a cold," she said. "What I can't imagine…what seems…what seems a bit unfathomable to me…" she took a deep breath "…is to live with this pain for five hundred years. Or even one hundred. It seems…impossibly long."

Maleficent looked as though Aurora had stricken her, and immediately bowed her head in a show of submission, as Aurora knew she would. "Forgive me," she whispered, as Aurora knew she would.

And this—this was the crux of why Aurora had declined Maleficent's offer. Perhaps, if they spent a few hundred years together, Maleficent would feel about Aurora the way that Aurora felt about her. She would, for example, know what to say to win an argument and she would not hesitate to do so when it served her purposes. She would find Aurora's quirks, though endearing, ever so slightly tiresome. She would see Aurora at her worst and struggle to remember her at her best.

But to Maleficent, their love was still new. Time passed and the world changed, certainly, but it was not the same for her as it was for Aurora. To her, twenty-five years was as nothing. Aurora could live to a ripe old age and Maleficent would still look at her as though they had just fallen in love.

Had the humans before her felt such immense pain at this realization? Or had they been able to enjoy it for the gift that it was? Had they never come across a story that opened their eyes to how tragic it was that their love, just like their lives, faded first?

When Aurora looked into Maleficent's eyes and saw the same fire in them she herself had not felt in years, it did not seem so bad to her that Maleficent would move on relatively quickly. She deserved to. She deserved to feel the seemingly boundless love she bestowed upon Aurora, and she deserved to feel it throughout her entire life, not just for a few years.

This time, when Aurora reached out, Maleficent did not pull away. She looked at Aurora, black eyes shining with unshed tears, and reached up to stroke her hair. Even the way Maleficent touched Aurora's hair made her ill. She touched it like it was gold, like it was as soft and lush and healthy as it had been when she was sixteen. The fact was that Aurora spent plenty of time touching her own hair, and she knew it to be grey and brittle and prone to matting or falling out altogether. And yet Maleficent still touched it like it was beautiful, in the same way she still looked at Aurora's face, which was pale and wrinkled and sallow, as though she were the fresh-faced youth Maleficent had first loved.

It was easy for Aurora to look at Maleficent and still think her lovely, for she was truly still young and beautiful. Aurora could not fathom how Maleficent looked at her that way, nor could she imagine what Maleficent would look like when she finally began to age, or whether she would ever age at all.

"There's nothing to forgive," Aurora said with a half-hearted smile.

"I can't help but feel I've stolen your life from you," Maleficent said miserably, still caressing Aurora's hair.

Aurora could have sworn she felt her heart snap cleanly in two with these words, and she began to cry. She threw her arms around Maleficent and buried her head in the softness of Maleficent's robes. "Never think that," she said firmly. "Never. For you are the only reason I had any life to live at all."

The next morning when Aurora woke, Maleficent was nowhere to be found. On the desk in her study, she'd left something like a note. Many half-finished versions of the same note lay crumpled around the room with haphazard blots of ink and furiously crossed out sentences, but the one lying out for Aurora to see contained no such imperfections.

_Please do not take me for a fool. In my heart I have always known that you could not love me nearly as much as I love you. It is not because you are human. It is not because you are old. It is for no other reason than that you are, as you have always been, far superior to me in every way. I know this because, though you have long since ceased to feel for me the way you once did, you have continued to treat my pathetic love for you with the utmost respect and kindness._

_For those few happy years when our love was equal, I cannot thank you enough. Before I laid eyes on you, I believed my heart to be incapable of feeling such a thing, and it was only through your perseverance that I was able to fully realize what it is to love someone so completely._

_I hope I may make up for that time in which you were angry with me for what I am by telling you how utterly impossible it is for me to love another. It was only ever you who could engender love in my heart, for you are the absolute antithesis of me. You embody "love, kindness, and the joy of helping others" where I am only hatred, wickedness, and selfishness. It was my selfishness which led me to ask you to share not only your life with me, but mine. I knew when I asked that it was wrong, and yet I asked anyway on the off-chance that I might once again cheat the laws of nature and keep you with me as I did twenty-five years ago._

_I have one last thing to say. It brings me unspeakable joy that you once cared for me enough to share my bed as a lover, but that time has passed. I shall remain by your side until your dying day, but I shall do so as your friend. I shall be what I was to you in the beginning, and I hope that you might think of me as such, and not resent me for holding onto what cannot and should not be._

_It is my fondest wish that you may live out the rest of your days without feeling any obligation to me. I am so sorry for all of the ways in which I have failed you. I hope that you might look back on the time we spent together at its best. I was unworthy of your love, but you gave it to me, anyway. I was still more unworthy of your life, but you gave it to me, anyway._

_I am forever in your debt. For as long as I live, you shall live on in my heart._

Maleficent was painfully true to her word. She made herself scarce, and she refurnished the separate room Aurora had refused all those years ago. When Aurora sought her out, she listened and responded as she always had: in a quiet, even tone and with extreme objectivity. Aurora truly began to feel that she was eighteen again and had just run away from her miserable life in King Stefan's castle only to meet with the source of her fondest dreams and most torturous nightmares.

There was one thing Aurora had forgotten after twenty-five years: Maleficent was a perfect liar. After several weeks, Aurora sometimes forgot that this was an act, and she had to reread Maleficent's note to remind herself.

In what Aurora considered to be undeniable confirmation of her theory, bereft of Maleficent's incredible love for her, Aurora's health quickly took a turn for the worse. Not a few months after Maleficent had written that note, Aurora was completely bed-ridden. Though Maleficent's cool exterior did not crack even for an instant, she almost never left Aurora's bedside. She sat for days on end and talked or sang or remained silent, depending upon Aurora's whim.

And, in one final display of the selfishness Aurora knew to be solely her own, Aurora allowed it. She did it because, though she was too ashamed to bring up the letter in conversation, she desperately needed proof that Maleficent still loved her the way she always had.

One night, Aurora awoke drenched in sweat and shivering at the same time. Outside, there raged a mighty thunderstorm like nothing this land had ever seen. Aurora flailed wildly until she caught hold of Maleficent's arm, and Maleficent, though she had been startled awake, took Aurora's hand gently and held it between her own. "There, there," she said sleepily. "It's only a storm."

"Sing me a song?" Aurora had asked, sounding not unlike a child.

Maleficent stifled a yawn—Aurora noted vaguely that she had never heard Maleficent yawn before. "Any song in particular?"

The room suddenly lit up as though it were the middle of the afternoon and an ear-splitting clap of thunder caused Aurora to yelp in surprise. She pulled Maeficent's hands against her face, and in the eerie light from the storm, she saw the faintest flicker of worry in Maleficent's eyes.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

Maleficent averted her eyes. "You're running a high fever," she replied.

Aurora knew suddenly what song she wanted to hear. She knew she would hate herself for asking if she lived to see tomorrow, and yet, that did not seem terribly likely. "My love is like a red, red rose," she said softly, squeezing her eyes closed against Maleficent's lovely face.

The only sound for some time was the driving rain outside the window, and Aurora thought with a mixture of triumph and sickening guilt that she must finally have reached and broken the limits of Maleficent's devotion to her selfish, horrible self. But alas, there came another great flash of light and clap of thunder, and then Maleficent began to sing.

"Oh, my love is like a red, red rose  
That's newly sprung in June.  
Oh, my love is like a melody  
That's sweetly played in tune…"

_It's true, _thought Aurora as a mixture of tears and sweat began dripping off the end of her nose. _It's true, and yet, my love has shriveled up and died._

"As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,  
So deep in love am I,"

_I have grown so cold and so callous to you_, she thought miserably. _How have I grown so horrible and evil? It was you who were pure of heart all along. It was always you who rescued me from my darkness, and here I am trying to pull you back down into it along with me._

"And I will love thee still, my dear,  
'Til all the seas go dry.  
'Til all the seas go dry, my love,  
And the rocks melt with the sun,  
And I will love thee still, my dear,  
While the sands of time shall run."

Maleficent was stroking Aurora's hair in an effort to calm her, but it only worsened the aching in her heart. What was it she wanted, exactly? To break Maleficent in her final hours? Or did she want Maleficent to be able to finish this song as though the meaning behind it were dead to her? Either way, she loathed herself for it.

"But fare thee well, my only love,  
But fare thee well awhile…"

Aurora felt like her head might explode. Her entire body ached and she found it difficult to breathe. But when she heard the tiny crack in Maleficent's voice, she forced her eyes to open and to take in what she had done. Maleficent's face was contorted in a silent, wracking sob. Aurora watched her as her face melted back into a neutral expression, and there was no trace that Maleficent had been upset at all.

"And I will love thee still, my dear,  
Though 'twere…ten thousand mile."

"Maleficent?"

"Yes, Aurora?" Maleficent did not open her eyes.

"May I ask you one last favour?"

Maleficent's composure broke, and tears began streaming down her cheeks. She shook her head hopelessly, "What?"

"Kiss me?"

Maleficent turned her head away and withdrew one of her hands to cover her face. She emerged several minutes later completely stoic and nodded calmly. Another flash of lightning flooded the room with light, but Aurora did not start at the sound of the thunder, nor had she seen Maleficent nod. She did not feel Maleficent kiss her, and she did not know that Maleficent crawled into bed beside her corpse and wept long after it had grown cold.

She did not know until nearly a thousand years later that she had been right the first time, that Maleficent was different, and that they would have been different. For the rest of her life, Maleficent never looked at another man or woman with anything even resembling love or desire. She also sought out the author of the book she knew Aurora had become obsessed with and gave him a very nasty and somewhat violent critique.

When Maleficent finally lay down her head for the last time on earth, and when in death she finally saw her beloved once more, she loved her just as much as she always had, if not a thousand times more.

And Aurora, who had in death been relieved of the deeply-ingrained pain in her heart which had caused her to doubt Maleficent's love, found to her immense joy that she was able to return that love a thousand times over.


End file.
